Over the past few weeks, I have been experimenting with some Microsoft Fabric features that I haven’t used in practice yet. For this data recipe, I’m looking at a specific issue where I ran into when I was looking closer into Azure SQL Mirroring into Microsoft Fabric.
Problem statement
When setting up database mirroring from Azure SQL to Microsoft Fabric for one of my demo databases, I ran into an issue while trying to connect to my Azure SQL database.
As you can see in the screenshot above, it seems that a setting on my logical SQL Server in Azure is misconfigured. Let’s resolve that in a couple of steps.
Step-by-step resolution
Before we can take the required steps to solve this issue, we need to understand what is going on.
A system-assigned managed identity is used to make a secure connection between different Azure services without requiring credentials. This feature needs to be activated. To activate this feature, I will need to go to my Azure resource. In my case, that’s the logical server to which my demo Azure SQL database is linked.
My logical SQL server is called oliviervs. Once I navigate to my resource, I need to navigate to the Identity section of the resource. For the logical SQL server, this is done by going to “Security” > “Identity”.
Once we are in the Identity section, we can immediately identify the “System assigned managed identity” section. As you can see in the screenshot below, the current status of this setting is set to “Off”.
After setting the status to “On” and saving the change, the Identity is created. If you want to learn more about Managed identities, Managed identities for Azure resources – Managed identities for Azure resources | Microsoft Learn
Now that the identity has been created, I can try to set up the Azure SQL database Mirroring in Microsoft Fabric. When I try to connect, instead of receiving the error message, I can see which tables are available for replication.
Currently, when writing the data recipe, you can only replicate 500 tables using Azure SQL Database mirroring into Microsoft Fabric.
After selecting the tables and confirming my choice, a status screen is shown to track the progress of the mirrored database setup.
Once the Database mirror is fully setup, an overview is shown of the mirrored objects and the status. In the example below, you can see the mirror is currently running, and 3 objects are replicated from Azure SQL into Microsoft Fabric.
Bon Appétit!